Migrating Office Template - Attribute Challenges

[Robert Nichols]

How does everyone handle custom surface, building materials, fills, etc when it's time to bring an office template up to speed with a new version of ArchiCAD? For several revisions, I just kept our existing attributes and updated a few odds and ends when incrementing the AC version of our template. Last time around, incrementing from 26 to 27, I thought I must surely be missing some improvements in the various attribute collections. Without thinking through the implications, I replaced our default fills and surfaces with a new set harvested from the v27 new file template. Wow - I sure regret that. Now I see how wrongheaded that move was. The internal ID's from the old and new set are mostly not matching up, and our office custom attributes are floating around in the middle of the mess, not finding their necessary dependancies.

Question: when working with custom studio attributes, can I manually give them an ID? It seems like it would work well to establish an id namespace that's easily clear of the default GS attribute ID's. Then, if I'm disciplined about defining new surfaces, for example, using only our own textures and fills, I should be able to weather a wholesale replacement os GS attributes without any trouble. Is this the correct approach?

Thanks, Robert

[Barry Kelly]

In 27 you can re-index an attribute to any number that is not being used.

You can also delete unwanted attributes and 'replace with' another attribute - this can be handy.

I create a new attribute with a number much higher than any others.

Then when a user creates a new attribute, its number will be one higher than that.

I can then re-index that if I want to add it to my template and I can then import those template attributes into any file without upsetting the user created attributes.

And the user created attributes don't affect my template.

I don't have many more spots before I will have to create a new fill with an even higher attribute number - but I am not expecting to be adding many more new fills to my template in the near future.

Barry.